“ Yeah, sort of, and Josie thinks she’s the foreman of the crew. Some things never change, right? I always put up with it because she gave me the skinny on the state’s cases against me and my friends. She’d tell me when investigators were sniffing around, and we’d close up shop and head to another jurisdiction. When I got arrested, she’d pull stuff out of the files. Why do you think you had so much success on my cases, Jake? It wasn’t just buena suerte.”
I turned toward Jo Jo. “So it was always an act, how much you detested your brother?”
She didn’t answer, and for a moment, the only sound was the whirring generator and the thumping pump.
“ Nah,” Blinky said, waving his shovel. “She still ain’t president of the Louis Baroso fan club, but blood is thicker than water. At first, she tried to get me to go straight, but then, I started carving out a piece of each deal for her. Hey, the state attorney’s office pays peanuts. Pretty soon, she’s my partner. Hey, Jake, I learned a long time ago it’s easier to get an honest person to steal than to get a thief not to. Anyway, where was I?”
“ Something about how smart Cimarron was,” I helped out.
Blinky used the back of his sleeve to wipe streaks of dirt-stained sweat from his forehead. “Yeah, smart enough to know when he’s getting taken for a ride. He was pressuring Kyle Hornback, who didn’t know jackshit about the oversubscription of stock, but had some photocopies of bank transfers that would have told Cimarron everything I didn’t need him to know.
Cimarron was in town and was gonna see Hornback when Socolow was done with him.”
“ Why’d you try to pin it on me?”
“ Josie’s idea, entirely.”
“ Luis!”
Blinky shrugged. “Well, it’s true, and I suppose it had to be done. Cimarron had to think you were in on the scam, that you were stealing from the company, and you were banging Josie, too. If he didn’t hate you, it would never have worked.”
Jo Jo Baroso had turned away so that I could only see her in profile under the glare of the spotlights. “So that’s what it was from day one, Jo Jo. Including that night in your house. The only reason I was in your bed was to bait the trap.”
“ Don’t tell me you’re hurt, Jake,” she said, still not looking me in the eye. “Don’t give me that sophomoric how-could-you-do-this-to-me-when-I-really-cared-for-you bullshit.’’
“ But I did!”
“ You dropped me, Jake. You dumped me. Do you know what that’s like?”
“ Is that what this is about, you getting even with me for that?”
“ No, it was just business,” Jo Jo said.
I shivered, either because I was soaking wet, or from her cold-bloodedness.
“ C’mon, Jake, don’t be sore,” Blinky said, annoyed that I objected to being set up for murder. “It isn’t like we knew what was going to happen. In the beginning, we didn’t even plan on killing Cimarron.”
“ What did you plan?”
“ We wanted him to come after you, but we knew you wouldn’t kill him. That night in the house, we sort of hoped you’d kick some butt, soften him up, and then we’d renegotiate from different positions. It hurts a man’s pride to be beaten.”
“ I know.”
“ But anyway, he stomped you pretty good, and that shot the plan all to hell. Then, everything got out of hand. I mean, Josie said she was afraid Cimarron was going to kill you, and I said too bad it can’t be the other way around, what with me being the beneficiary of his life insurance and Josie as the sole heir of the estate. So we kept talking about it. What if, this. What if, that. How can we get all of her? Finally, it was a no-brainer. After all, if Cimarron died, we’d get her all. I figured you’d follow Josie up here, and I knew you’d come to the rescue if you saw Josie all black and blue.”
I turned to Jo Jo. “But Cimarron did beat you, didn’t he? You weren’t lying about that.”
“ Yes,” Jo Jo answered. “I told him I saw you at the music tent, and you wanted me to come back to Miami with you. He hit me, Jake. Time and again, just enough to cause pain without knocking me unconscious or leaving scars. He was a master at it. Can you blame me for wanting him dead?”
“ No, but I blame you for setting me up.”
Blinky leaned on his shovel as if it were a cane. “We figured you’d be so mad about what he did to Josie, and remembering what he did to you that you’d grab a pitchfork and make shish kebab out of him. At first, we planned to have Josie back you up, claim it was self-defense, keep you from ever getting charged.”
“ Why didn’t you, Jo Jo? Even after killing Cimarron, you could have told the truth, that I was defending myself. It would have been justifiable homicide if I had killed him.”
She didn’t answer, but Blinky did. “Once we had to give you a little help in the barn, the script changed. Josie got worried. What with her history with you, it would have looked like the two of you conspired to kill him. It was a close call. Hell, we almost went that way, but in the end, we figured the truth wouldn’t wash, and you’d both be indicted. Trying to get you off would make her look like a two-timing slut, but blaming you made her look like a grief-stricken widow, at least that’s the way we figured it.”
“ So I was just a fall guy to get the insurance and the stupid treasure claims?”
“ Not so stupid,” Blinky said. “Not when you’re talking about all of her.”
“ Her? That’s the third time you’ve talked about getting all of her. The mine?”
“ No, the Silver Queen.”
“ That’s what I said, the mine.”
Blinky was puzzled. Then he figured it out. “No, not that silver queen. This one.” He grabbed one of the light poles and swung it around, tossing the beam to a position directly behind him. It illuminated a lady of silver nearly twenty feet high. She looked a little like the Statue of Liberty, except this lady sat on a throne in a half chariot, half ship.
“ Ain’t she something?” Blinky asked. “I been studying up on her. I read all of Cimarron’s newspaper clippings from a hundred years ago.” Blinky lowered his voice into a Miami con man’s imitation of a Lowell Thomas newsreel. “‘The queen reclines with the voluptuous grace of a Cleopatra in her Egyptian barge.’
I walked over for a closer look. The chariot sat on a pedestal trimmed with a drapery of silver, gold, and what looked like ebony. Leading to the throne were steps inlaid with silver dollars. On the risers, the words “Silver Queen” were raised in letters of solid silver. The background was a mass of brilliant colored minerals, and the borders were white crystals. The words “Aspen, Colorado” appeared on a lower panel of the pedestal. The letters were formed from broken pieces of silver on a background that looked like pure white sugar. I moved closer for a better look.
“ Diamond dust,” Blinky said.
Six pillars of burnished silver and crystals inlaid with mosaics of different ores rose from the pedestal and supported the throne. The wheels of the chariot were four feet high and made of solid silver. A canopy of minerals and crystals covered the queen’s head. Her hair was made of glass, and the drapery across her Ruben-esque bosom was adorned with bright minerals I couldn’t identify. In her hand, she held a silver scepter that must have been ten feet long. It was topped with a silver dollar a foot across and a five-pointed silver star. Two Greek gods ran alongside the chariot carrying cornucopias filled with gold and silver coins.
“ Her head and body are carved from the biggest, purest silver nugget ever mined,” Blinky said, “more than a ton, and it came from this mountain.” There was a note of pride in his voice, as if he had made the damn thing. “What do you think of her, Jake?”
“ Let me try to find the word. How about tacky? Gauche? Overblown? Laughable? Kitschy, if there is such a word.”
“ Yeah, well I know it ain’t too subtle. Cimarron called it one of the last purely Victorian pieces, but who gives a shit if it ain’t a da Vinci? See, Cimarron figured it out. It’s got historical value plus the value of the minerals and the fact there’s never been anything like it, before or since. After the World’s Fair, the lady had been sitting there at the museum over in Pueblo, but they were going to tear down the place. The guys who owned the mines and contributed the minerals were mighty pissed and wanted her back, but the museum guys were going to send her to the Smithsonian or maybe New York, so the mining guys just stole the damn thing. Brought her here on a freight car and lowered her back into the ground from whence she came. The mine was petered out by then, and the bottom
